Thread: deer with my bow.......

Stump hunter you sure have it right with the"baker stand".I was allways a little armed (weak) fellow,I grunt and strain and seem like I'd be up 25 feet,look down and I'd be just off the ground.Hunted many a time 8 foot mabey less off the ground,I guess I am lucky,I never caught the tree bark rash from sliding down with your arms around the tree! I guess yall remember the improvement with the hand climber attachment,made it a little easier.SC CRAB,the deer in the background looks to be a buck also.

SC.CRAB, if you can pull that one into bow range you will surely have a good day of hunting.

bearclaw, the so called improvement did make it easier, but you already had $35 in the stand and then $10 more for the attachment, you had to be rich to buy them both-LOL

them baker stands was the most uncomfortable piece of junk i ever used, but at the time i dint know it . i never set on mine. i put me a pipe flange on it and carried a small seat which id have to screw in after i got it where i wanted it. then they come out with the hand climber i used to rest my butt on. that was a killer to. my wife hunted with me and she never mastered the tree huggin to climb. shed get on it and id have to lift and grunt helping her get up high enough for me to get under her stand. then id get under her and push her up as high as i could reach, and thats where she hunted from, which wouldnt be but about 7 ft or so off the ground. back then there was a lot of game management lands around here and on opening days or doe days, when thered be a lot of folks in the woods, you could hear clanking going on all around you where baker climbers was going up. . soons i discovered the loc-ons and tree steps i give my bakers away.

back in the 70's and 80's when i was involved with a bow club, there wasnt many deer killed during archery season. i guess at any given time we had about 50 or so bow hunters in our club and out of all them hunters thered be less than a half dozen or so deer taken with arrows. in the first eight years our club give away 16 free mounts, 8 buck and 8 doe and me and another feller claimed 14 of the mounts. i won 7 buck mounts and he won 7 of the heaviest doe mounts. i think one reason i was so sucessful was i took two weeks vacation for bow hunting and most others would have to hunt on days off. usually theyd save their vacation for gun season, if they had any. i dint usually take any time off for gun hunting. i got 5 weeks vacation a year, taking two weeks during bow season and the other three id use for crappie fishing. there wasnt as many deer back then and we had to drive long distances to hunt plus the equipment was much simpler. now theres deer almost everywhere and the ultra fast bows and fancy equipment makes it easier to kill a deer. and these days just about everybody bow hunts so the odds are more deer will be killed. it would be interesting to see a lot of todays bowhunters having to hunt the way we used to. :D. even today, killing a deer with an arrow aint a simple matter but its still not as tough as it once was. sometimes i think id like to give it another try. with a little practice i could probably still handle my equipment but deer hunting is a lot of work if you do it right and the thoughts of working dont appeal to me like it used to :D. i been thinking about hunting em with a camera if i can get me one of the pro model digital nikons. i still have all my long lenses i used when i was shooting sports that will work on a pro model digital SLR. i also still have my film cameras but the expense of shooting film dont appeal to me either. with a digital camera and long lenses i could still claim a trophy and not have to do all the work of harvestin a deer. :D

I remember those baker stands as well. I still have bark imbedded in my chest and fingernails left in trees.

When I first started bow hunting people would laugh at me for what they called then wasting my time. There wasn't alot of deer then but the woods was full of hunters. You almost had to run the other hunters away from your stand. Your right Rango, about all the noise the hunters would make going up the trees, no wonder we didn't see many deer back then.

I hunted with my bow for three years before I started killing deer, then all the ones that laughed at me for wasting my time wanted me to show them how to bow hunt

I met Fred Bear a couple years before he died, and to talk with him about bow hunting was one of my life's greatest memories. He told me that he thought in 20 years they would make bows that would be as fast as some guns! The old guy was smart and he knew what he was talking about.

Now days if you don't bow hunt people think you're not a hunter at all. My how times change

Thangs musta been different in Carolina. I remember when we shot bow tournaments we had to go to Carolina cause there just werent many clubs in Ga. within reasonable driving distances. What few that was closeby in Ga. we shot them too. There was alkways one or two shoots a year in Clemson, Abbeville, and Greenwood that we'd make sure to go to. Lots of fun! As far as hunting, all timber land was open hunting so we could hunt about anywhere. We would do alot of our scouting watching for tracks in dirt roads right after heavy rains to zero in as to which county we were gonna hunt. We would camp every weekend pretty much roughing it, but atleast we had a tent, a heater, a coleman stove, and a grill. (We did eat good.) I can remember during bow season we'd draw straws to see who would get out of the tent to light the salamander heater before daylight. We'd dress inside our sleeping bags it was so cold sometimes. We never saw alot of other people hunting either. Riding the county roads we might see another vehicle or two but that'd be about it. And the Baker stands...well, I couldnt afford one of those so I built mine out of angle iron and plywood. Mine was bigger and had rails on it so I could place a piece of plywood across the rails for a seat once I got climbed up in the tree. I had an old couch pillar to lay across my chest when hugging the tree to climb up or down and it doubled for a cushion while sitting on stand.
I might be wrong, but ALOT of people might not have taken up bowhunting if it was still like it was back in the day. Bows were so slow about 15-20 yards was a max. shot on a deer. Climbing stands were heavy and uncomfortable. Winter hunting clothes (insulated bibs/coveralls in camo was un-heard of, or they mighta been there but I just never looked since I couldnt afford them.) Yep...times have changed, and so has hunting. But it's still fun!

I believe the hand climber that doubles as a seat was one of mankind's greatest inventions